For the comparisons, you can use the string methods find and rfind (which searches from the right). They return the index of the position of the substring within the string. They return -1 if the substring is not found. Ergo, you see above input_cell.value.find('deleted') >= 0 to evaluate whether or not the substring ‘deleted’ exists. For the .pf comparison, I used rfind as well as something in Python called slicing.